Despite the worldwide increase in discourses and politics around sustainability, the meanings of the concept vary significantly in different linguistic communities and cultures. This may undermine the multidimensionality and ethical dimension of the concept and jeopardize its political status. This article aims at highlighting discourse strands on sustainability from different linguistic communities in an intercultural orientation, and how they are theoretically shaped. It comprises a revision of existing and our own discourse analyses. The results show hegemonic discourses of economistic conceptualizations, as well as alternatives, which vary between communities and languages. We would like this article to contribute to an exchange and a profound discussion between the linguistic discourses, as well as to a methodological reflection on discourse analysis from an intercultural perspective. We conclude that critical transdisciplinary research, either as a science of sustainability or as transformative research, breaks with hegemonic orders, and thus, complements understandings of (un)sustainable ways of life.